Steve Jobs wanted Apple’s browser Safari called “Freedom”

Former Safari engineer recalls "Safari" was picked a month before release.

In the early part of this century, Apple was beholden to Microsoft for the best Web browsing experience on OS X. In January 2003, the company released its own Safari Web browser in order to take control and responsibility for Web browsing on the Mac, which was increasingly becoming a critical aspect of computing.

According to former Engineering Director of Internet Technologies Don Melton, who spearheaded the project at Apple to build a next-generation Web browser, Jobs tested several names for the browser among the engineers on the development team.

"As I remember, Steve just started saying some names out loud—I suppose trying them out to see how they felt in his mouth and to his ears," Melton recently wrote on his personal blog.

"I don’t recall all the names, but one that stands out is 'Freedom,'" Melton continued. "Steve spent some time trying that one out on all of us. He may have liked it because it invoked positive imagery of people being set free. And, just as possible and positive, it spoke to our own freedom from Microsoft and Internet Explorer, the company and browser we depended on at the time."

Few of Jobs' suggestions stuck, however, and Melton, his fellow engineers, and even Apple's marketing department struggled to find a name that wasn't universally reviled.

"From that point on, we had a brief discussion about the product name at random design sessions every month," Melton explained. "Again, I don't remember any particular name we talked about. They all sounded so awful to me that I've purged from my mind the trauma of imagining the browser being labeled with any of them. And the candidate names seemed to get worse the closer we got to shipping."

Internally, the browser was codenamed "Alexander"—a reference to Alexander the Great, the ancient Greek conqueror. The WebKit engine that powers Safari was adapted from the open source KHTML library, which powers a Linux web browser call Konqueror, so perhaps Apple viewed the new browser as its own attempt to "conquer" the Web. But engineers also jokingly referred to it as "iBrowse."

Melton admitted he isn't sure exactly who came up with the name Safari, but it was apparently chosen in early December, just four weeks before Safari was announced at Macworld Expo in January 2003.

When Product Marketing Manager Kurt Knight told Melton that Safari had won out over other options that had been mulled over the past year, his initial reaction was muted.